


Nowhere Girl

by KrisseyCrystal (IceCreAMS)



Category: A Saga of Light and Dark - T. J. Chamberlain
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Beaches, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mermaids, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Summer Vacation, just a pinch of it y'kno for flavor's sake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26108950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCreAMS/pseuds/KrisseyCrystal
Summary: "Mermaids aren't real," "I'm totally over what happened last year," and other false truths brought to you by Nerissa Smith.
Relationships: Nerissa Smith/Emmet Pomlei
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	Nowhere Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silver_fish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silver_fish/gifts).



The straps of her sandals are easy to slip off her ankles. 

Nerissa takes both in hand before she steps onto the beach. Her toes sink into cold, grainy sand and her nose scrunches up. Unlike the books and romance movies her mother likes to pick for flick night, nothing about this is romantic in the early hours of morning. Yes, the ocean is a gorgeous, baby blue. Yes, the rush and sigh of it against the shore make a strange, mystical calm fall over her. 

But there are tiny seashells jutting up at painful angles if she steps on them wrong, and thin dark pieces of algae and seaweed strewn all over. Only the strip of sand where the water has risen time and time again has been paved perfectly smooth and gradient.

Nerissa tip-toes closer to the water and hisses the instant it brushes over the top of her feet.

A northern wind tosses her hair to the side. It lifts the hem of her white shirt and billows it around her hips. The sun is beginning to peek over the horizon. The sky is brilliant: glowing highlighter yellow streaked over cotton-candy orange and pink. Nerissa smiles and tilts her head back as the wind blows in again.

She breathes in once. Twice.

When Nerissa next opens her eyes, she sees the tail end of a red fin sticking up out of the water. A grin spears across her face. Quickly, she tosses her sandals behind her onto the sand. She steps further into the water.

“Emmet!” 

Her voice echoes across the sighing waves. She waits and waits and when she sees his back, once again breaking through the water—closer to the pier sticking out over the ocean on her right—her grin widens. 

Nerissa grabs her sandals and hurries over to the old wooden boards. Along the posts holding it up above the water, green muck and barnacles cling. Ropes that have been tied at their base for who knows how long are fraying and sticking to the wood. It’s gross. It’s kind of amazing: that visible test of time that accompanies the creak of the boards under her feet as she crosses it to its end. 

Under the surface of the water just beyond the edge of the dock swims a familiar shadowed shape. He’s circling himself, over and over again—waiting. 

_Well. Probably shouldn’t keep him waiting_ too _long._

Nerissa grins, drops her sandals onto the pier, and takes a few steps back for a running start.

When she launches herself into the air, a giggle escapes her. She clasps her hands around her knees and crashes with an almighty splash into the ocean. Saltwater surges up around her, enveloping her. Maybe it should be strange that the feeling of being swallowed is so welcoming; Nerissa doesn’t have an explanation for it. She used to be terrified. She used to hate it. 

She opens her eyes and sinks. 

Her brown hair coils, loose and thick, around her.

Everything that she can see is blue. It’s dark and murky, but after the initial burn, she grins because even through the shadowed, muted hues, there streaks a familiar, comforting, burning red hurtling closer.

When he pulls up in front of her, she can see his bronze skin warm and glistening under the refracted light. He has the cheekiest grin.

Nerissa fights the urge to roll her eyes and lets him take her wrists in his hands, pulling her close. Then, he cups her face. Her feet, on either side of him, brush against his opalescent tail fins. They ripple in the water and she wants to giggle again. If only she wasn’t holding her breath.

He sneaks an arm around her waist and there, under the water, their foreheads brush together.

Her hair slips over his bare shoulder.

* * *

“Mermaids aren’t _real,_ Si.”

Poseidon looks wounded. His big, ginormous blue eyes and pouting lips draw out the roundness of his cheeks and the tiny shift of the disappointed slant in his jaw. His spoon clings against his porcelain bowl. “I’m telling you: I saw what I saw! We even talked! Why don’t you ever believe me on stuff like this?”

Nerissa stifles a laugh and rounds his stool at the countertop. She reaches up for the cupboards. “Because I know you and you have the most active imagination in the entire world.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t tell what’s real from what’s not!”

“Si, you’re twelve, and last time you had an imaginary friend—who was very nice, I’ll admit—it was six months ago,” Nerissa says over her fetched bowl of _Raisin Bran._ She turns for the fridge. “You’ll have to forgive me if I find myself a little skeptical that you’ve suddenly made friends with a mermaid on our extremely isolated summer vacation.”

Poseidon presses his cheek against his fist; it’s adorable, Nerissa thinks, how chipmunk-like it makes him. He grumbles under his breath about _something-something-mermaid._ Nerissa lifts an eyebrow.

“What was that?”

“I said he _wasn’t_ a mermaid…he was a merman.”

Nerissa blinks. “Huh.” The word hangs off the tip of her tongue. A theory settles into place that she had always kind of suspected about her little brother but didn’t have the authority or place to articulate it. Honestly, it kind of warms her heart: the possibility that maybe he’s like her. “Okay.” Nerissa sets the milk jug beside her bowl and sticks out a hip. “Then tell me about him.”

“What’s the point if you’re not gonna believe me?”

“Maybe I will if it sounds like you’re telling the truth. You never know.”

Poseidon lifts his face and frowns at her. His furrowed eyebrows jut out over his eyes and after a moment of internal deliberation, he sags and caves. He stirs his melting _Lucky Charms_ with a spoon. “His tail looks kinda like a lionfish.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Got all these stripes down his scales and really weird, cool-looking fins. Translucent at the end, but he’s got like, little spokes along the sides.”

“I see.” Nerissa scoops up her first bite.

“I had to look up what kind of fish he reminded me of because I wasn’t sure. Looked kinda freaky at first. Thought he was poisonous.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Down by the pier. I was sketching and he just swam right up to me.”

“Huh.” 

Poseidon snaps his gaze up and meets Nerissa’s eyes with his own. Their blues have always been near-identical; staring into the other has a strange, near-mirror-like feeling. “You still don’t believe me.”

“I mean, he _sounds_ cool.” If mermaids were real, Nerissa might be more invested. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know; he didn’t tell me.” Poseidon pauses and taps his spoon against his lower lip. The more he loses himself in thought, the more his dangling legs begin to kick back and forth. “I don’t think he can speak English.”

Fair.

Nerissa finishes her bowl and turns around for the sink at her back. She yanks on the faucet. “Maybe you should give him a name.”

“Huh.” Poseidon’s voice grows soft. “Maybe I should.”

When Nerissa turns around to hold out a hand for Poseidon’s bowl, she finds her little brother suspiciously absent and gone from his stool at the island counter. She rolls her eyes and bites back a smile. 

* * *

She can’t sleep that night.

To be fair, Nerissa can’t sleep most nights, but today feels heavier than most and the images that burn against the back of her eyelids leave an ashy taste in her mouth that makes it hard to breathe. She clutches her wrists tight to her chest and stares out the moonlit window, tangled in her bedsheets.

 _Give it time,_ her therapist had said. Nerissa hated the soft hum of her voice as much as she was grateful for it. _Time does wonders for memories. It lessens them. Dulls them. You may find you are grateful for this time apart from everything._

Nerissa stares out at the starry sky above a black sea.

After a long moment, she reaches for her phone on the bed stand. She unplugs the charger. Unlocks the screen. Taps and holds “1” until it asks for her password.

Then, she holds the phone to her ear.

_You have one saved message._

* * *

“Issa.”

“Mm?”

_“Issa.”_

“What?” 

Nerissa doesn’t move from under the covers. Poseidon huffs and climbs over her.

Immediately, Nerissa shoots upright and nearly clonks his head against her own. She squeals and he yelps. “Hey! What the fuck are you doing?! You’re soaking wet!”

“Well, you weren’t going to move, so I—”

Nerissa lets out the biggest, longest groan of frustration and yanks her blankets up to burrito them around herself. She digs her heels into the mattress and scoots away from the other side of the mattress her monster of a little brother elected to sit on—said little brother who is still dripping and making a small spot on her bedsheets that’s growing wider and wider the longer he’s _sitting there_ and _not standing up._

“Now I have to change my sheets!” Nerissa shouts. “You punk!”

“At least it’ll get you up out of bed! It’s already three o’clock, Issa!”

_Wait. Is it, really?_

Nerissa feels the fight leave her. Before she can look away, Poseidon shoves his phone screen in her face. It’s the first time she notices that he’s not that all of him is soaking wet—just his lower half.

“W-what am I—”

“—I took a photo of him! Now you _have_ to believe me!”

Nerissa blinks. Slowly, squinting, she takes his phone and peers at the photo up close. It’s a terribly awful picture. It’s blurry and unfocused, like the figure had been in motion when Poseidon tried to snap the shot. There’s a splash of water cutting across the middle of it, interrupting everything and making it hard to determine what, exactly, she’s supposed to be looking at.

“Who is this?”

“The merman I was telling you about yesterday! Can’t you see his tail?”

“No.” Nerissa scissors out two fingers to blow up the image. The grainy quality immediately is exaggerated. “I can’t even tell what it is I’m supposed to be seeing. Those might as well be someone’s swimming trunks—if it’s even supposed to be a person.”

“Of course he’s a person!” Poseidon huffs. 

Nerissa hands him back the phone. “Then why don’t you take a video of him next time?”

Poseidon blinks and looks at the screen in his hands.

Nerissa smiles. Fondly, she raps the back of her knuckles against the top of his mop of brown hair. “Sorry not all of us can be geniuses like me,” she teases and Poseidon huffs, sagging back until he slides off the bed and rises to his feet. “Did you come up with a name for this merman friend of yours, at least?”

“I resent that statement. But yeah! I was thinking of calling him Emmet.”

“Emmet,” Nerissa repeats. For some reason, it makes her laugh. The blanket covering her head falls down to her shoulders when she tilts her chin up to the ceiling. Her legs criss-cross under her. “Of all the names you could pick, you picked Emmet?”

“What? What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s just so human.”

“I think it’s nice!” Poseidon’s cheeks puff out. “Plus, it sounds a lot like Emma.”

“And Emma is…?”

“Another pretty name.”

It _does_ sound like Emma, but that doesn’t answer any of Nerissa’s questions. She shakes her head and smiles. “All right, all right. Whatever. I guess if I have a hard enough time thinking the guy’s real, then I guess the next thing you’re going to say is that I don’t really have a say in whatever you want to call him, huh?” 

“You’re damn right,” Poseidon huffs and Nerissa laughs.

She reaches out and ruffles his hair and changes the subject to if they’ve eaten already and if Mom is there or not and Poseidon answers that yeah, she’s been up since the sun rose and made them pancakes first thing but now is out to get more groceries. Nerissa nods.

She decidedly does _not_ give her mind the opportunity to interpret the situation as one in which she couldn’t be bothered to be woken up for a handmade breakfast.

* * *

When Mom returns from her grocery run, Nerissa is the only one who answers her call to carry in the bags. At first, Nerissa’s not quite sure _why_ this is—Poseidon’s probably still playing with his imaginary merman or sketching by the beach—but she shrugs it off and asks Mom what she got and the two fall into an easy, light dance around each other, stuffing the pantry and fridge. 

“Well,” says Mom over the running faucet as Nerissa unloads the last of the chip bags into the cupboard, “Since Si isn’t here to get a say, how about you pick what we have for dinner?”

Nerissa puffs her cheeks out round and considers it honestly. She swings open the pantry door and braces her other hand against the doorframe as her eyes scan the shelves up and down. “I don’t know. I’m not that hungry,” she lies and tosses a look over her shoulder. “What sounds good to you, Mom?”

Mom turns off the water. She laughs as she dries her hands. “That’s why I asked _you_. You didn’t get to have the pancakes I made this morning.”

“Yeah, Si mentioned that.”

“Did you see we saved some for you in the microwave?”

“N…” Nerissa stops. She blinks, head snapping towards her mother with twin lifted brows. “No?”

Mom gives her a curious look. It takes a single step to stand in front of the microwave above the stove. She clicks the door open and inside, Nerissa can see the stacked pancakes covered by a paper towel.

“Have you eaten anything at all today?”

Nerissa’s chest seizes.

It’s kind of like ice, she thinks. All pain and in the center of her chest. Sharp, kind of like the pointy end of a mace if it’d been clubbed into her center. The microwave door slams shut under her hand.

“Nerissa—”

“—I’ll go ask Poseidon what he wants for dinner.”

“Nerissa!”

“Be right back!”

She’s out the back French doors before her mother can say another word, bare feet slapping against the sandy wooden boards of the ramp leading down to the beach. Her heart pounds hard; she kind of feels sick. It’s kind of stupid, really; all of it. They’ve _spoken_ about this not running away thing. About not hiding or avoiding difficult conversations because she anticipates a false truth about the space she takes up. She needs to “genuinely hear the people who care about her” and “talk things through.”

Doesn’t make it that much easier to actually talk about.

“Si!” she calls. The clouds hang heavy and grey above her. Wind buffets her, knocking the ties of her shirt wildly in front of her. Nerissa wraps her arms around herself and wishes she had brought a jacket. “Hey, Si! Where are you?”

Beyond the right, empty pier is a large, protruding boulder. Perhaps he’s behind it?

Nerissa trudges closer, pushing her feet through the sand. Her eyes watch the way the tiny grains run over the tops of her toes like an hourglass. The motion’s actually kind of soothing. The sand—chilled under the pre-storm wind—is soft. Pliant. The nice kind that’s pleasant to press her feet into and sink. 

She doesn’t lift her eyes until she rounds the boulder. “Hey, Si. Mom’s trying to figure out what to make for—”

She stops.

Poseidon stops the video on his phone, too, eyes equally as wide on his sister as the bare-chested young man sitting next to him. 

Young man? No.

Nerissa can see red stripes set against an ethereal, shiny white-silver. Spokes—spokes? Is that the right word for them?—line the sides of his tail— _a tail a legitimate tail holy shit—_ and true, just like Poseidon said, the end melts into a translucent fin—three of them, in fact. All lined and veined and actually kind of pretty, like thin threads of gold that might shimmer under the sun if it bothered to peek through the clouds. Actually, he’s kind of pretty. He’s— _holy shit. He’s a merman. He’s a real live merman._

_Poseidon was right._

“Oh,” Nerissa says.

She stares.

Poseidon clears his throat. His phone falls between the tight vee of his bunched-up knees and stomach and he gestures with a wobbly hand between his sister and the curious merman—who doesn’t, in the slightest, seem nearly as afraid of Nerissa as Nerissa must clearly be of him.

“Well, finally. I was wondering when you’d meet him. Nerissa, this is Emmet. Emmet, my big sister, Nerissa.”

Emmet watches her for a long while with an unreadable expression. Shouldn’t he be terrified? Or is he too dumb to be scared of the danger a human could pose to him?

Nerissa stares back.

She is very, _very_ much not looking at his bare chest.

“Um.” Nerissa squeaks. “Cool. So, uh—” She looks to Poseidon. “—this is real, huh?”

“Yep.” 

“Awesome.” Nerissa nods and she gestures back to the house with a thumb, swinging her arms one over the other awkwardly as she tries to gather her words. “Great. That’s…swell. Um, I’m gonna go back and, uh—wait. No.” She came out here for a reason. She shakes her head and fans out her hands. “Dinner! Dinner. What do you want?”

Poseidon pouts at her. He flattens out his legs so they stick out in front of him like two poles. 

“What?”

“Really?” Poseidon whines. “That’s _all_ you’re gonna say? ‘Cool’? I show you a real, live merman—which _you_ never believed me about—and all you have to say is that he’s ‘cool’ and then ask me what I want for dinner?”

“Give me a break here, Si! I’m still in shock! What do you _want_ me to say?”

“I—I don’t know—an apology, maybe?”

Nerissa huffs and puts her hands on her hips. She puffs her cheeks and after a second moment of hesitation, finally sighs. “All right, all right. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.” 

“That’s better.”

“But—” Nerissa huffs and throws out a hand between them. Emmet seems somehow amused at their bickering, though Nerissa’s not sure _how_ considering Poseidon mentioned a potential lack of English. “—what about you, huh? You’re gonna get on my case for being so blase about the existence of mermaids when apparently the first thing _you_ do when you meet one is show off Youtube videos?”

Without missing a beat, Poseidon shrugs. “I mean, yeah? Don’t you do this with every new friend you make?”

That’s…regrettably fair. And unfair at the same time.

Nerissa turns away and refuses to point out the elephant in the room, which is the fact she doesn’t _have_ a whole lot of friends, and is, to both of their knowledge, very terrible at making new ones. 

Poseidon waves a hand. “Spaghetti, by the way.”

“What?”

“For dinner. Spaghetti sounds good.”

“Oh. Okay.” Nerissa nods. She glances between Emmet and Poseidon again. For some strange, really weird reason that makes her spine feel tingly, her eyes linger on Emmet’s again. He has very earthy, very brown eyes for a creature of the sea. After another long minute, she turns away. “Um. See you at the house, then?”

“Are you gonna tell Mom?”

“Si, I don’t think she’d believe us.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Nerissa shakes her head. “Okay, then. No. I won’t tell her. Satisfied?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Issa.”

Nerissa smiles and gives them both one more look-over. Her heart does a strange, pathetic thing in her chest she doesn’t want to think about, so she turns away for good. “Don’t mention it,” she mumbles and heads back for the beach house.

* * *

The memories—when they hit that night—burn. 

Nerissa lies on her back with her brown hair splayed out around her head and shoulders, curling over the mattress like clouds. She lays her forearm over her eyes and hides in the shadow of her elbow. She breathes. And breathes. And breathes.

 _Don’t think about it,_ she tells herself. _This is why Mom took us out here to the ocean in the first place. You’re surrounded by water; you’re supposed to be fine and not think about the fire._

_So why do I not feel fine?_

_Why am I still—_

Nerissa’s lips press into a tight, thin line. Her next inhale is cut short, strangled by the sob squeezing out of her throat. As if a line has been cut holding her down, she turns suddenly, sharply, rolling onto her side and reaching for her phone. It makes a thudding noise when she picks it up, bumping against the surface of the end table. She yanks and yanks and yanks without seeing for the phone charging cord to pull it free.

As soon as she can, she crams her phone against her face.

_You have one saved message._

* * *

Poseidon drags Nerissa out to the beach the next day. And the day after that. Several days in a row, actually—all of them in order to meet the merman who keeps, without fail, swimming up to their private little rented neck of a long beach. Nerissa finds herself baffled the more she interacts with this Emmet. He really is unafraid of anything, while at the same time curious about everything, especially the things they can pull up on their phones to show him.

Nerissa wishes, in turn, she could ask him questions that she never knew she wanted answers to before.

“Are there lots of others like you?” she asks, squatting into the lapping tides. Her hands cover her bare knees. She keeps her eyes lowered to the waves, watching as they rush in over her feet.

Emmet lies on his stomach next to her with his tail up. His translucent fins dangle over his back as he, in turn, watches her. He tilts his head and his ever-present, dumb smile pinches. Nerissa sighs and rolls her eyes and points straight out at him. She swings that arm over the water and gestures broadly.

“You,” she stresses. “Are there others like _you_ out there?”

Emmet blinks. He nods more slowly than before.

“So…I mean, I guess I’d ask you why you keep coming back to see _us_ then, but I guess that’d be difficult to answer. I should stick to yes or no questions, huh?”

The next tide slides in and Nerissa does _not_ watch the way the sudsy white ends skirt up Emmet’s forearms. She presses her mouth together and looks back out into the ocean—until, very suddenly, Emmet points at her.

Nerissa blinks at him. “M-me?”

Emmet nods. He plants his hands into the darkened sand and pushes himself upright, peering around. The boulder is in his way, shielding him from the view of the beach house, but also probably obstructing his own sight. Finally, he turns back to Nerissa and frowns, sticking out his hand in a small gesture a little above the sand.

“And…Poseidon, huh?” Nerissa murmurs. A smile stretches across her face. “Mm. You’re lucky, then. Unfortunately, it’s much harder for me to go observe _you_ and _your_ friends than it is for you to visit us.”

Emmet folds his forearms over the sand again.

Nerissa watches him for a moment before she looks back out to the horizon line.

* * *

Two weeks later, the fire eats at her in her dreams and that’s different—that’s different—that didn’t actually happen—and consequently, that’s all Nerissa needs to jerk awake from her nightmare and gasp haggardly into the darkness. Her arms shake behind her. Bewildered, wide eyes snap to the white-pained window and the shimmer of clear, cloudless night outside.

She doesn’t know why she grabs her phone and jacket and heads outside.

She doesn’t know why the first thing she thinks of in this moment of fear and memory and loss is a sea creature who can’t even understand her. 

There’s probably something there, her therapist might say. Something about the irregularity of such a person in her life: the break of pattern, of routine. Hadn’t the woman once said there was a benefit to interrupting the cycle of her spiraling thoughts by introducing something like a shock to her system? It takes 90 seconds to latch onto a full panic but if she got off the old, familiar runaway minecart track in her head and abandoned ship early by diving into something else—

—why is she thinking of the water again?

Nerissa stops in the shadow of the boulder.

She breathes.

And she breathes.

She sinks to the sand and pulls her knees up to her chest. Her phone blinks on in the quiet; an accidental press of the side of her finger against the lock key.

When Emmet arrives, he pulls himself up quietly beside her. Like usual, like he always has, he doesn’t say a word. Doesn’t comment on the way she doesn’t lift her head when he slides up on the sand. Doesn’t make a sound at the tremble in her shoulders and jaggedness of her breaths. He sits. He waits.

He breathes.

Finally— 

“I don’t think I was supposed to survive that car wreck,” Nerissa murmurs into the tight, small space between her knees and chest. “At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.” 

She takes a shaky breath. She lifts her head. “God, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s not like you’re going to understand me. But at the same time, I feel—” Nerissa stops herself because the answer is too much. It’s always been too much. “—I feel like one impossibility might help another? Maybe? Like, if _you’re_ real even when you’re not supposed to exist, then maybe _I too—”_

Her voice gives out. She starts over.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if that makes sense. How am I _supposed_ to feel about being the only survivor of something that didn’t hesitate to kill other people?” 

Emmet watches her.

Nerissa swallows and sniffs. When she picks up her phone again, Emmet leans over to look as she shows him the screen again. This time, she opens up the number pad. Her finger presses into the “1” until it begins to ring. Her thumbs tap in the familiar string of numbers.

_You have one saved message._

“But then I have _this_.” Nerissa breathes. Her throat is tight. Her eyes burn. “My least favorite sound in the world.”

She presses on the speakerphone, crosses her forearms over her knees, and holds out the phone angled towards Emmet. Then—when the message finally plays—it fills the soft silence between them with ragged breathing and hitched, tinny sobs. 

Emmet frowns. His eyebrows furrow.

When he looks to Nerissa next, she could swear the expression reads: _What the fuck?_

Wetly, softly, she laughs. She lets the voicemail play until it’s finished—two whole minutes and four seconds of someone else’s tears.

“Weird, right? That’s probably what you’re thinking. And yeah, it probably is really weird.” Nerissa sniffs and wipes her nose across with the back of her wrist. “After the accident, when I woke up in the hospital, the nurses gave me my phone back. It was strange. I hadn’t even—I just—I had so many missed calls. And all of them, every single one, were from my little brother.” She looks to Emmet and can barely see him through the hazy blur filming over her eyes. Her lips pull tight into a tilted smile. “This voicemail? It’s his. I don’t think Si even realizes he left it.”

Nerissa takes a shaky breath. “But sometimes, just to shut myself up, when I think it should’ve been _me_ who died in that wreck and not Dad or those other two people in the other car, when I think Mom might resent me because I lived and he didn’t, I—I listen to it. It reminds me that…”

_That what?_

Nerissa sighs and crosses her forearms over her knees again. “I don’t know. It’s all—it’s all a lot, isn’t it? It’s _so much_. It’s _too_ much.”

Emmet touches her arm. 

Nerissa lifts her head.

With a look in his eye, he gestures with an arm out to the gigantic spread of ocean in front of them. The horizon line is barely even visible in the darkness; the sky melds perfectly into the sea, an all-encompassing, thickening shadow that could swallow her up if she wanted.

“Yeah,” Nerissa rasps. She’s not quite sure what he’s getting at. She wipes her nose with her wrist again. “I know. It’s fucking huge.”

Emmet smiles. There’s something different in his eyes, now, as he turns and points to her phone. Then, he pinches his fingers, leaving a small space between. 

Nerissa stares at him until she can feel the tear tracks start to dry over her cheeks. 

Emmet gestures again.

She catches his wrist.

“No, no, I—” She loses her voice at first, not sure where her thought was originally going. But somehow, it aligns with what he’s trying to communicate. “—yeah. I think I get it. I think I get what you’re saying.” Nerissa’s inhale is jagged and cold on its way in; when it slides back out of her, it doesn’t feel quite as unsteady. “Yeah.”

She looks back down at her phone and cradles it in her hand again. On the screen in a luminous, dark hue is the number pad. 

“It only takes the smallest things sometimes, huh?”

Emmet bumps her shoulder with his own.

Nerissa turns to him and smiles. It feels wobbly, still; it doesn’t quite feel certain. But she doesn’t have to fix it or solve it all at once. “Yeah,” she rasps, soft and quiet. Her fingertips run over the edge of her phone. “Thanks, Emmet.”

Something that can fight the fire in her mind, she thinks—and, most appropriately, douse it with water. 

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU TAYLO FOR THE REQUEST <3 <3 It's always a delight to write their OC's...and throw them into various different AU's and scenarios. I must admit, I'm rather fond of Mermemmet. <3 <3 also, by the way, did you know they're going to be in a BOOK coming out soon about this kiddos?? Check out [this tweet](https://twitter.com/laphicets/status/1292992751475154944?s=20) for more information!!
> 
> title is a reference to yet another Beatles' song: "Nowhere Man" 
> 
> and lastly, if you want to request your own fic (with your OC's or otherwise), check out my pinned tweet! thanks for reading!
> 
> [tw](https://twitter.com/kissykrissey) / [tblr](https://krisseycrystal.tumblr.com/)


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